Show and prove! Use this lesson plan and say farewell to fiction reading logs of yore, as your students (literally) draw connections across theme, cause, and effect.

Give students many opportunities to see how visuals can influence a story's meaning. Show off your acting skills and read a great book to help them learn!

Students will learn how to identify story elements and create a short and sweet summary. They will fill out a graphic organizer and solidify their understanding by creating illustrations to show major plot points that they find themselves!

Students will learn about the holiday El Día de los Muertos through engaging activities and connecting to their own traditions.

This lesson focuses on how punctuation affects reading fluency and comprehension using graphic organizers and sentence stems. Use this lesson as a stand-alone activity or a support for the Punctuation and Prosody lesson plan.

Use a student-friendly glossary and sentence frames to learn about wild weather! Scaffolds will help your students answer text-dependent questions. This lesson can be paired with the main Informational Text: Close Reading lesson.

Use this lesson to help your ELs learn character traits and find them in a text. It can be a stand-alone lesson or a support lesson to the Identifying Character Traits lesson.

Ask an important question this month: What does an activist do? This engaging lesson can be used leading up to Martin Luther King Jr. Day (and year-round). It supports students in understanding what it means to be an activist and how Martin Luther King Jr. used collaborative action to change the world and speak out against oppression. Perfect for first graders and second graders, this activity explores word meaning and other reading and writing skills.

Charts, graphs, and diagrams are complex text features for students to decipher. Use this lesson to familiarize students with these features. It can be taught on its own or before the lesson Charts and Graphs and Diagrams, Oh My!

Graphic novels, animated stories, and storytelling videos pop with enhanced meaning, tone and beauty. Use this lesson plan with a mentor text to teach your students to note how such features contribute to the reader’s experience.

Introduce your students to some of the major structural elements of poetry in this comprehensive lesson.

Use this lesson to help your ELs learn key vocabulary terms that they will see in future lessons about the American Revolution. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the lesson A Living Timeline: The American Revolution.

In this lesson, ask students to compare and contrast two important African-American historical figures. Students will write an informational paragraph on the similarities and differences between W.E.B. Du Bois and George Washington Carver.

This lesson will allow students to explore the backgrounds and contributions of the Founding Fathers by completing an online scavenger hunt and writing a basic biography.

Students will have a blast turning a reading passage into a Reader's Theater skit. This lesson teaches them to use dialogue to help readers understand the experiences of different characters.

This engaging lesson teaches students about the famous author Faith Ringgold. Students will explore two pieces of literature, comparing and contrasting story elements, then write opinion pieces to illustrate which book they liked best.

Your students will learn academic vocabulary and use a graphic organizer to compare and contrast two short stories. Use this as a stand-alone lesson or as an introduction to the Comparing and Contrasting Short Stories lesson plan.

This is a lesson about the immigration procedures at Ellis Island. Students will learn about the process and creatively write about what it was like for immigrants to pass through Ellis Island.

Students will analyze census data from Sojourner Truth and Walt Disney using past tense verbs and sentence frames. It can be used on its own or as support to the lesson Researching the Past Using Primary Sources.

Look at history! In this lesson, guide students through an exploration of the context, causes, and effects of the Transcontinental Railroad, and help them practice identifying the main idea and supporting details in a nonfiction text.

Students will learn about three nonfiction text features: charts, graphs, and diagrams. They will analyze and interpret the information represented in these visual forms and discover how they aid in the comprehension of nonfiction texts.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a 17th century writer and philosopher who today is considered one of the first documented feminists and advocates for women’s education. In this lesson, students will read two nonfiction texts about Sor Juana and discuss her life and accomplishments before writing an opinion piece about her.

By fourth grade, most students are familiar with story elements such as setting, characters, and plot. In this lesson, students will compare and contrast the elements in two stories with similar themes.

In this lesson, students will identify nouns and pronouns as they distinguish between the main idea and supporting details. It may be taught on its own or used as support for the lesson Compare and Contrast Texts on the Same Topic.

Take your fourth and fifth graders on a deep dive into the civil rights movement with this lesson on Amelia Boynton Robinson. A key activist in the movement, Amelia played a critical role in organizing the Selma to Montgomery march. Your students will read, annotate, and analyze her biography through multiple reads, before discussing the text with their classmates.

In this literary lesson, students use fairy tales to practice identifying character traits. Students are challenged to justify their reasoning using text based support.

By fourth grade, most students are familiar with story elements such as setting, characters, and plot. In this lesson, students will compare and contrast the elements in two stories with similar themes.

This lesson combines historical facts and creative writing to engage students in exercises that enhance both vocabulary and social studies knowledge.

Let's learn about natural disasters. After reading through some informational texts, students will use their close reading skills to answer questions about different types of disasters.

Make it move! In this lesson, students will learn about energy and make connections between force and energy. Through a hands-on approach, students will work in teams to construct and report on their experiments.